Firefighting Drones Tested at U.S. Air Force Base

The unmanned K-MAX, helicopter successfully conducted a firefighting mission during a demonstration on Nov. 6. (Photo by Lockheed Martin)

Can a remotely piloted medium-lift helicopter used by the Marine Corps to supply frontline troops in Afghanistan also help fight wild fires back home? That's the question an industry team from Lockheed Martin and Kaman is currently exploring with support from the U.S. Department of the Interior.

Earlier this month, the team conducted what it said was a successful demonstration of a Kaman K-Max helicopter fitted with a Lockheed unmanned mission/sensor suite at Griffiss Air Force Base, in Rome, New York, one of six FAA-approved test sites for drones.

According to Dan Spoor, VP of Aviation and Unmanned Systems at Lockheed Martin's Mission Systems and Training business, the K-Max delivered, without a human being guiding it to target, firefighting supplies to designated areas as well as extinguish a controlled fire in a cut-out propane tank.

"In over a period of an hour … we were able to dump 24,000 lbs of water, or about 3000 gallons, on the fire," Spoor stated, adding that the helicopter can stay in the air for 2.5 hours before it needs to refuel.

Aiding the unmanned firefighting effort was a small Indago quadcopter remotely piloted by an operator in the vicinity. "We put it up 200-300 feet above the airfield, and it provided situational awareness, identified where the fire was," Spoor said. This data was then transmitted to the K-MAX controller.

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The Indago quadcopter has a gimbaled daytime and FLIR Quark infrared sensor to detect hot spots, which are then geo-referenced via GPS. In the demonstration, there was a pond on the other side of the airfield whose location was already programmed into the unmanned K-Max's mission module.

Once it had the location of the fire, along with the pond, the K-Max could go scoop up water, 500 gallons at a time, and drop it on the hot spot. "It knew based on its height and speed when to release the water," he said, "and it was geo-referenced into its flight pattern where the water would need to land to put the fire out."

The Department of the Interior currently uses manned K-Max helicopters to fight fires. However, they are mostly reserved for use during the day because "the risk to pilots flying at night is just too high," department spokesperson Jessica Kershaw noted. Likewise, fog and cloudy conditions can ground pilots.

In addition, pilots need timeouts in order to operate an aircraft safely. "The pilots have to spend a certain amount down before they can go up again," Spoor said. The idea is to fly normal K-Max helicopters for 8 hours during the day and then have the unmanned helicopter run 8-16 hours at night. This arrangement "will more than double the amount of time any given aircraft will be available to support the firefighters on the ground," Kershaw stated.

The Marine Corps' unmanned K-Max helicopters wrapped up their deployment in July. But the Lockheed team has been demonstrating a new concept for the Office of Naval Research's Autonomous Aerial Cargo/Utility System (AACUS) program.

Using a K-Max as the test bed, the team has tested a sensor/navigation suite that enables an unmanned helicopter to go beyond highly scripted point-to-point auto-flight and, instead, assess of its own the environment before determining where and if to land.

Spoor says there are no plans right now to bring that more autonomous capability to firefighting. Rather, they are proceeding at more incremental pace. Next spring, the team test the unmanned K-Max's ability to lay lines of fire retardant and "how much an additional value that brings," Spoor said.

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